In U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,097,771 and 6,317,466, issued to Foschini et al. On Aug. 1, 2000 and Nov. 13, 2001 respectively, it was proposed that the bit rate at which a digital wireless communications system communicates data in scattering environments may be significantly increased. In the disclosed form of spatial multiplexing, an array of multiple antennas is used at both the transmitter and receiver and the channel over which communication occurs is decomposed into m subchannels. In the same frequency band, m one-dimensional signals may be transmitted into a scattering environment. Such an environment makes these m transmitted signals appear, at the receiver antenna array, to be spatially independent. The increased bit rate may be enabled by special receiver processing that maximizes the minimum signal-to-noise ratio of the receiver detection process.
Communication systems that use the technique described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,317,466 are said to use multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) wireless network technology and, more specifically, Bell Labs Layered Space-Time (BLAST) technology.
It is common, in analysis of wireless environments, to describe channels over which the signals are transmitted in a matrix notation. More particularly, a channel may be characterized by an Eigenvalue. (An Eigenvalue of an n by n matrix A is a scalar c such that A*x=c*x holds for some nonzero vector x, where x is an n-tuple.) The foundation on which the realization of high capacity transmission is built for MIMO systems is an environment of parallel non-zero Eigenvalue channels. An environment including such physical propagation channels is a so-called “rich scattering environment”. In a rich scattering environment, the signals emitted from the transmit antennas experience a complex propagation (scattering) before arriving at the receiver antennas. In addition, for the MIMO system to function optimally, the propagation paths are required to be statistically uncorrelated. It follows that, if one of these conditions (non-zero Eigenvalue channels, statistically uncorrelated propagation paths) is not satisfied in a practical deployment, a MIMO system may be unable to provide the high capacity transmission promised by the BLAST technology. In this case, the MIMO channel may be considered to have degenerated into a SISO (Single Input Single Output) channel, with only one non-zero Eigenvalue.
A conventional Vertical-BLAST (V-BLAST) system, which is an adaptation of the original BLAST system, may malfunction or fail to work with a degenerated MIMO channel. That is, as the propagation environment improves in respect of noise and interference, accurate communication using a MIMO system may become more difficult.
The requirement of a rich scattering channel for correct MIMO system operation conditions has represented a challenge to MIMO researchers. In particular, effort has been devoted to conducting extensive MIMO channel measurement to prove that for the Personal Communication Services (PCS) cellular telephone frequency band, most of the practical channels may be considered rich scattering environments. However, there are several deployment scenarios where existing MIMO techniques (BLAST, V-BLAST) may not work properly. A first such deployment scenario is one involving a Line-of-sight (LOS) channel, such as is found in fixed wireless communication systems. A second such deployment scenario is one involving MIMO keyholes, which are degenerate channels found in known environments that have particular electromagnetic propagation conditions. A third such deployment scenario involves fully correlated antennas, which arises when there is a space limitation at both the base transceiver station side and the user equipment side.
In the case of LOS channels, solutions that have been proposed involve using “beam forming” or “open loop transmit diversity” to avoid the BLAST limitations. However, these solutions suffer from a large capacity loss. Alternatively, it has been proposed to map the MIMO transmit channel onto two polarization diversity modes. Field measurements have shown that two non-zero Eigen-modes do exist for the two transmit antenna case, even in a near LOS environment. However, such a mapping cannot be easily generalized to cases wherein more than two transmit antennas are used.
Clearly, there is a requirement for an improvement to BLAST so that a MIMO system may function where the environment is not strictly a rich scattering environment.